New Obama politics shop faces old questions

When President Barack Obama shuttered the White House’s Office of Political Affairs three years ago, aides claimed it was merely a streamlining move — but the action came just in time to head off unwelcome comparisons with former President George W. Bush, as a government report blasted abuses in that office during the Bush era.

Now, Obama is reopening a White House political shop and sailing back into murky legal waters his team seemed eager to steer out of not so long ago.

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The back-and-forth over the White House political office seems to capture perfectly Obama’s ambivalence about old-school politics: his instincts are to heed good-government reformers and avoid anything that smacks of political favors being doled out on the public dime. But he’s also sensitive to complaints from lawmakers, and even his own staff, that he pays too little attention to the political needs of his backers in Congress — particularly with a tough midterm election looming.

Obama’s 2011 announcement that he was shutting down the political office came just three days before the Office of Special Counsel issued a scathing report finding widespread violations of the Hatch Act involving Bush appointees during the months before the 2006 elections. The OSC report didn’t cover Obama’s tenure, but found that the basic structure of the White House political office — essentially the same in both administrations and several prior ones — violated federal law by having junior-level staff do political work in their offices.

Obama’s lawyers have never publicly blessed that conclusion — to do so would be to admit that the political shop operated illegally for his first two years as president. But the closure of the White House political operation in 2011 dodged the possibility of having the president’s aides operating in defiance of a legal opinion issued by the federal agency charged with enforcing limits on political activity by government employees.

But Painter says he fears a repeat of what happened in 2006, as aides to a re-elected president sought to use the political might of the executive branch to improve the standing of the president’s party in Congress.

“I’m worried about this situation,” said Painter, now a law professor at the University of Minnesota. “The main thing is they’re going to be doing the same thing that was happening under Karl Rove in 2006, and either it was right or it was wrong.”

House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Darrell Issa leapt on reports that the Obama White House was re-opening its political office, saying the action “again raises troubling concerns about the illegal use of taxpayer funds to support campaign related initiatives.”

“I have not heard from either the White House or the Office of the Special Counsel about how this reconstituted effort assuages the legal concerns raised only a short time ago,” Issa said in a statement issued hours after POLITICO broke the news of the reconstituted office.

A White House spokesman said officials are confident that the new office will stay on the right side of the legal line.

“The new Office of Political Strategy and Outreach will coordinate the White House’s existing political strategy and outreach activities…serving as a single point of contact for the [Democratic National Committee] and national, state and local political groups,” spokesman Eric Schultz said.

“A 2011 Office of Special Counsel report recognized the need for the President to get advice and political information but criticized the longstanding practice across multiple administrations of both political parties of having an Office of Political Affairs in the White House dedicated to systematic, campaign-related political activity,” he added. “This White House recognized the need for a consolidated office to provide the President political information, which OSC has described as appropriate official activity.”

A White House official said that the new office “will not be engaged in political activity as defined by the Hatch Act,” the 1939 law which attempts to separate partisan politics and official government business. That official business may even include such activities as approving blast e-mails and direct mail pieces to be sent out by political groups or campaigns, as well as coordinating fundraising and political rally appearances by Obama, the aide said.

In addition, White House officials said that some staff employed in the new office — such as director David Simas — would be permitted to engage in more overtly partisan activity in their private capacity on White House grounds, just as other senior Obama aides can. However, in deference to the OSC stance, junior aides will not take part in such activity at the White House.

The new arrangement will pose challenges. If the legal strictures are interpreted broadly, the office could be neutered to the degree that that it can’t actually do much beyond answer phone calls from party leaders and elected officials, rendering it little more than a symbol of Obama’s concern about the 2014 elections